Chapter 4: The Cache





 



     "Where'd she put my horn at?" Benny mumbles, loading a few lead balls from the top shelf of the dry larder into a leather satchel and throwing his old long rifle over a shoulder.

"You old goat, you ain't shot a gun since last Samhain," Charity scoffs as she pulls a baking sheet from the stove.

"Should be up here with the shot," he groans in the flickering candlelight while straining to reach the back of the shelf.

"Might be hanging right where you left it last week," she chides with a nod over to the whiskey barrel. "Best take a passel of these biscuits to get you through."

"Won't need em," he answers while strapping the powder horn over the other shoulder. "That varmint'll come to me."

"Don't count your chickens before they hatch," she cautions as she slips a tin into his bag.

"You don't know what I seed up there," Benny calls by way of goodbye as he heads out into the orange glow peeking over the eastern ridge. 



    Apex predators were largely gone from the southern Appalachians by the 1830s, hunted by settlers as competition for livestock or chased to the most remote ridges. Benjamin Reed had done his share so he knew it was easier to let the varmints come to him. Otherwise, the hounds would run it all over the mountain before tiring it out. Then they'd come out of the kill torn to pieces, if they survived at all. He just needed the right bait, and stumbling upon the buried ox carcass the prior evening had provided just that.

     Bears, panthers, and wolves all cache their prey when too much of a meal for one sitting. They usually drag the carcass to some inaccessible place and dig it under dirt and leaves to mask the smell. Then they den up within eye, ear, or scent sight to protect their larder from hungry scavengers.



     "Rightio President Andrew Jackson," Benny encourages the flop-eared mutt trotting gleefully at his side as they skirt the upper corn field in the reddening sky. "Just keep that trap shut!"

He'd trained his favorite hound to stay at his heel and to only howl on command, so he was sure this dog wouldn't spook their prey. The canine scent might even help to draw in the beast. 

     "Ten green bottles hanging on the wall..." Benny begins to sing as they creep up the steepening hollow in so-called silence, but then catches himself and laughs as Jack glances up with raised ears. 

     The dawn chill seems to last forever on a western slope, and that's just fine for the old woodsman now breaking into a sweat as they climb the trace past the last canebrake. Jack soon catches the scent and leans into his leather lead, his back bristling into a peak as he leads them into the darkness of the rhododendron grove.

     Benny lets the hound do a little digging around the ox carcass while scanning the area in the growing light, spotting a rock outcropping on a steep hillside about fifty yards to the south. He sticks a finger into his mouth and holds it up, soon satisfied that the cold side of his skin is upwind from the planned perch. 

He gives the leash a little tug and motions the hound to heel with a downward hand signal before they pick their way through the brush and over the rocks to the ledge.




     

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chapter 6: Seeing Red

https://images.app.goo.gl/ mvDH2dWkbKtZatn37      "Tarnation," exclaims the prostrate and still tipsy Benjamin Reed lodged atop the rhododendron thicket. He moves a shoulder in an attempt to roll and quickly pulls back, the weight shift threatening to dislodge him from the precarious perch at least twenty feet off the ground. He tries lifting a foot with the same result and remains stuck after attempting to move all four limbs, but at least he knows his arms and legs are still working.      "Rock of ages cleft for me," he sings with a sigh, resigned to using the one movable part that doesn't risk a tumble to the death:  Let me hide myself in thee; Let the water and the blood, From thy wounded side ..., is halted mid-verse when his squinting eye catches a reddish motion on top of the ledge.      In later years illicit moonshine became associated with insanity or worse, blindness and kidney failure. In the early twentieth century, as coppe...
Read more

Chapter 7: Lone Wolf

     "What's the matter pop, cat got your tongue?" a red-bearded young man calls as he and a hound peer down at the gray-haired old man stuck in the top branches of a rhododendron grove. "Wolf's more like it," Benny scowls at his twenty-four-year-old second son, the spitting image of him at that age. "You put me here, now get me down!" "Hold your horses," Daniel laughs at the reproach and follows the loyal dog from to the ledge his master had fallen from. "I can reach your boot from here."      The footprints in the mud around the cache site had told Benjamin Reed all he needed to know about the varmint of Cow Creek. It's not easy to distinguish wolf from dog tracks, but the ability of a single large canine to drag and bury an oxen carcass told him it was a lone wolf.      The Kentucky Appalachians of the 1800s housed both gray wolves and the slightly smaller red wolf, though that taxonomic distinction was unimportant to the...
Read more

Chapter 5: Backfire

https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2021/05/is-the-kentucky-long-rifle-misnamed.html      Five sharp caws from a big black bird glistening in the sunlight atop the tallest fir on the northern ridge announce Benny's climb up through the rhododendron thicket to a sandstone outcropping above the cache site. He skirts behind the ledge and sets his satchel on a narrow foothold strewn with pine needles. Removing the biscuit tin, he levers off the top and hands one to the hound, signaling him to lie down. Jack happily complies by curling into a circle and chomping into the buttery dough still warm from the wood stove.      Next he removes the three lead balls and places them in a nook on top of the rock. Then he slips the gun strap off his shoulder and leans the long rifle against the back of the rock, the end of the barrel reaching to the shoulder of his six foot frame. He unclips a ramrod from under the barrel, leaning it beside the gun before squatting down t...
Read more